Cluj and beyond

I told her I would go to Tibet, for some peace.

But not peace as in sitting in a room without walls and remain silent with my eyes shut.

Peace as defined by the absence of current turmoils. Peace can simply be a different set of turmoil. It can be the stress of moving around. Stress of finding food. Stress of witnessing tragedy and injustice. I don't have any of such "luxury."

Tibet has mountains. It has monks who can't speak as freely as monks here. It has solitude. It has excitement. But all so foreign from where I am.

I told her I wanted to hike from the capital to the Nepalese border, or the other way around, depending on the political situation.

She asked if my thirst for peace was because of her, because of all this drama between us. Partly, I guess. Even almost entirely. But in some ways, not at all. Deep down, there's fundamental cause for the dramas that we witness, that we share. That cause needs to be exposed by peeling away all the layers of drama that attempt to hide the problem.

I have a friend from Romania. She has been living in France for quite some time, most of which, in the past six years, in the small city of Reims. Or maybe it's a big city. I only have heard of it because of Joan of Arc, who was either born there or was burned to death there. She's a doctor, my friend. A surgeon. She writes to me, once a year, perhaps once every two years. She's one of the few women who had wanted me more than I wanted them, and no surprise, I wasn't interested. Still, every time she writes to me, it is as if we had been corresponding daily.

She asked me if I had a girlfriend, or was married, perhaps even with children.

Me? The person who needs to go to Tibet, the rooftop "country" within a country, the country that was once my country. People who are married, or even just have a girlfriend, why would they want to go to Tibet to get away from it all? They would need to separate from the person they have found themselves attached to, first.

What about her? She has said nothing. Didn't declare anything.

There's a reason I wasn't interested. It's not just the physical attraction or lack thereof. She's fine looking, not crazy amazing, but I never needed that. She wasn't exciting. And in every email I am reminded that she doesn't like changes. She is in Reims because that's where she feels just fine. We had a long discussion once about how she is satisfied with life, that she isn't like those people who's always expecting more. Some years later I realized there's a difference between striving for a better life and expecting a better life to come to you. To put it differently, it is possible for someone to be ambitious about her goals while still enjoying everything she has currently. She has the done the latter, but she never showed any interest in reaching for something more complex, more challenging.

I guess her life is already challenging. In the latest email, she complains about lacking sleep. As a surgeon on call, she gets to spend a lot of time cutting and gutting. She hates dealing with accidents in the emergency room. She would prefer a life of sleep than having to deal with other people's trauma. I can't imagine my life having to suffer through so much stress and so little sleep. I get much less sleep than I should, but that's dedication to tango, I guess.

She wants me to go to Reims. I have never thought about that city. I know nothing about it, don't even know for sure where it is on the French map. I am intrigued by why she wants me to go. At the same time, I know if I invite her to the US, she would unlikely to get out of her comfort zone. But we're friends; there's no reason to cross the ocean for each other. Silly rules.

I visited her long ago, when I was still living in Europe. I met her on the train, on my way from one little city to the next in Transylvania; I think it was Sighisoara to Sibiu, or the other way. I struck up a conversation with her. And before I hopped off to a town I no longer could recall, I got her email address. Then when I was living in England I got assigned to help out contractors in the Bucharest office. So when I was back in Romania, I traveled a bit more, and that included a trip to the city of her hospital, Cluj. Back then, long after fall of Communism, the trains were still atrociously slow. It took eight hours or more to get from the capital to her city that wasn't that much farther than New York is from Philly.

I remember we went to see a movie, in English, with semi-funny man Robin Williams. She didn't like the movie, while I thought it was fine. We walked a lot.

That was typical of her take in life. Simple things. There was need to go see anything extraordinary. We just walked, walked everywhere. When I later went to visit her in Lille, her first home in France, just across the Channel from me, we walked a lot too. In Cluj, we walked. I remember the houses, the small streams, the big river; was that the Danube that would empty into the Romanian Black Sea coast? I can't remember. I just remember that I wasn't too excited. Our conversations can be amazing, but they also can slow me down. I am very different from her. I am always looking for adventure, especially then, when I was 28. I wanted to see something new every day, every hour. She was happy with whatever life gave her. Of course, if life offered her a choice between staying in Cluj or doing an internship in Germany or France, she would take the time to consider. I don't know or remember quite well her reasons for leaving Romania for Germany and later France. Something to do with being treated with more respect outside Romania. Romania was, and likely still is, very much a machista country, and surgery in any country is the domain of men, so you can imagine what it is like to be a woman in that country in that profession.

I remember she didn't even eat much. I am always looking for something new and exciting to try, savor the differences, or be disappointed at the similarity. I remember she didn't eat much. I remember in Lille I was eating my Bouillabaisse alone, with her watching. She wanted me to stay longer in Lille, but I couldn't, or I didn't want to.

In Cluj I stayed one night, in her tiny tiny apartment shared with another female surgeon. I remember the lighting was terrible. In this country we are used to surgeons having a glamourous life, living the upperclass life. After Yale I realized medical students in general had a miserable life, and that view of luxury came only when white hair has ravaged the sleep-deprived scalp of the scalpel handler. Nevertheless, where she was staying was extremely depressing.

You have to understand that her lack of ambition and lack of expectations for better life is not innate to her. Growing up in the second poorest Communist country (after Albania) with so much fear and suspicion instilled in the populace, you are always grateful for even just sustenance, if not a tiny bit of luxury. Of course, the product can look the exact opposite. My first girlfriend in college was also a product of the Romanian Communism. But she always wanted more, always expected life to give some free lunch, or that there was free lunch to be had. Even after earning six digits in finance she was still a cheapskate. Same origin, different outcomes.

But I couldn't take more of the walking and the doldrums. The apartment was not atrocious for me. I was fine. But there wasn't some stimulation, not for my eyes, not for my intellect. And I wasn't crazy about girls back then like now because I had a girlfriend.

Despite that, as I walked up the uncomfortably high steps of the overnight train back to the capital, this woman, this surgeon, gave me two things. She gave me a cross. We went to a service the previous day, my first and so far only service at an Orthodox church, and Romanian Orthodox, too. She knew I wasn't religious, but she also knew my thoughts, my faith, were as much religious as any religion can offer, minus all the symbols. So she gave me a cross with Christ etched on it. I hung that cross in my room wherever I had gone since returning to the US. However, I am not sure where it is now. I hope in one of those small boxes.

The second things she gave me was a kiss on the lips.

It was unexpected. She was talking about this man she was seeing. A man who was married but was willing to leave his marriage for her. Or not. He was one of those men who preferred to lie to everyone than being truthful to a single person. She had been telling me about her predicaments, feelings.

Now, a kiss. Not sure what that meant, either. I didn't know how to take it, and what to do with it in the train, in the airplane, in the journey I was continuing without her. We never talked about that, and not about the cross either. She was still the same, then, or in Lille, and apparently, now.

Am I different? I am for sure a bag of memories. That's what I have, for certain, until the day I start to become senile. The day when most of my worries would seem, in retrospect, so irrelevant that in that old age I would laugh at my youth, spent too often on the incompatibilities with certain women. I am at least for now a bag of memories. I wish I can be as sure that I am a bag of wisdom. A bag of rational decisions. A bag of courage and true grit. But I am not empty of these things, either.

I am a bag of memories. And I remember many things about this woman, this surgeon, who still likes writing to me, and in doing so, reminds me that friendships, however strange, in whatever forms I am not accustomed to, last much longer than most things in life, perhaps some will even outlast memories.